A Yankee Gets Schooled in King Arthurs’s Court: Canadian Labour Law as a Cautionary Tale
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Description
Harry Arthurs has managed to be both mourner-in-chief for the impending demise of the aging “Wagner model” of labour relations that Canada and the United States share, and an aspiring architect of the future of work law in North America and beyond. From his lofty perch, he has chronicled the arc of organized labour’s rise and decline, on this continent and beyond. Never losing sight of the forest for the trees, and armed with a consummate erudition and eloquence, Harry has become a kind of labour law prophet for the advanced capitalist world, and especially for its Anglo-American regions. I write as one of his humble American followers. Harry’s importance to American labour lawyers and scholars stems partly from the location of his perch in Canada. We in the United States could learn a great deal—if we were capable of learning it—from Canada and the trajectory of its labour law regime. Of course, Harry would be the first to caution us about the complexity of cross-country learning. But if any two national labour law systems are “mutually intelligible,” ours should be. Canada’s basic framework for union organizing and collective bargaining was famously modelled on ours. It is a striking illustration of the “extraterritorialization of American labor law.” Our National Labor Relations Act (NLRA ), or Wagner Act, of 1935 served as a model for Canadian reformers in the mid-twentieth century, and the basic features that distinguish the Wagner model from much of the developed world—enterprise-based bargaining, exclusive representation, and majority rule—are still at the core of both systems. Yet, Canada has largely escaped one central pathology of American labour law: its sheer obduracy. Canadian labour law thus suggests some paths not taken in the United States.
Source Publication
The Daunting Enterprise of the Law: Essays in Honour of Harry W. Arthurs
Source Editors/Authors
Simon Archer, Daniel Drache, Peer Zumbansen
Publication Date
2017
Recommended Citation
Estlund, Cynthia, "A Yankee Gets Schooled in King Arthurs’s Court: Canadian Labour Law as a Cautionary Tale" (2017). Faculty Chapters. 430.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/430
